Ellen M. Peck - Sweet Mystery: The Musical Works of Rida Johnson Young

THE BROADWAY LEGACIES SERIES

Geoffrey Block, Series Editor

Series Board

Tim Carter

Kara Gardner

Kim Kowalke

Dominic McHugh

Jeffrey Magee

Carol J. Oja

Steve Swayne

Larry Starr, Emeritus

Stephen Banfield, Emeritus

South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten

Jim Lovensheimer

Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical

Charlotte Greenspan

To Broadway, to Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick

Philip Lambert

Irving Berlins American Musical Theater

Jeffrey Magee

Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

Dominic McHugh

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

Todd Decker

Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War

Carol J. Oja

Well Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart

Dominic Symonds

Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance

Kara Gardner

The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfelds Rivals

Jonas Westover

Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical

Kevin Winkler

Pal Joey: The History of a Heel

Julianne Lindberg

Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical, Revised Edition

Tim Carter

Sweet Mystery: The Musical Works of Rida Johnson Young

Ellen M. Peck

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Peck, Ellen M., 1973 author.

Title: Sweet mystery : the musical works of Rida Johnson Young / Ellen Peck.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. |

Series: The Broadway legacies series |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020014204 (print) | LCCN 2020014205 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190873585 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190873608 (epub) |

ISBN 9780190873615 (online)

Subjects: LCSH: Young, Rida JohnsonCriticism and interpretation. |

LibrettistsUnited States. | LyricistsUnited States. |

Women librettistsUnited States. | Women lyricistsUnited States. |

MusicalsUnited States20th centuryHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML423.Y68 P43 2020 (print) | LCC ML423.Y68 (ebook) |

DDC 782.1/4092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014204

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014205

Dedicated to my Bushel of Pecks: Mom, Dad, Johnny, and David. Thank you for your love and support.

The subject of Ellen Pecks Sweet Mystery: The Musical Works of Rida Johnson Young, the latest addition to Oxfords Broadway Legacies, is the librettist and lyricist Rida Johnson Young (ca. 18751926), one of the pioneering figures in American musical theater. During her creative years, Young was in such demand that throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, nearly all the major composers in the operetta genre set her lyrics, a veritable whos who in a musical theater genre that included such luminaries as Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Emmerich Klmn, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml. But aside from two popular films starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Naughty Marietta (1935) and Maytime (1937), both of which used Youngs lyrics (albeit with new dialogue), her work quietly vanished in the decade following her death, along with most members of the operetta species.

While Young may no longer be a household name and her lyrics, when heard, are usually sounded without attribution, they have demonstrated a surprising durability. Audiences unfamiliar with her name still might recognize Youngs song Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life from what Peck here describes as Madeline Kahns postcoital punchline in the role of the happy Bride of Frankenstein in Mel Brookss Young Frankenstein (1974). In recent decades, Hollywood and Broadway buffs also noticed that in addition to Sweet Mystery, a second song originally heard in Naughty Marietta, Im Falling in Love with Some One, appeared in both the film and stage versions of Thoroughly Modern Millie. As with so many lost, forgotten, or misplaced lyricists of Youngs era, we may still know some of these songs without realizing that the woman who wrote their lyrics was unquestionably a formidable and central figure in the early years of the twentieth century.

After writing Brown of Harvard in 1906, a successful play that included songs set to her own lyrics, Young was selected to write the book and lyrics to what is widely recognized as Victor Herberts most significant and lasting musical, Naughty Marietta, first staged in 1910, a show described by the musical theater historian Gerald Bordman as The American masterwork of the era. Two years later, Young made history as the lyricist and librettist assigned to Jerome Kern when the untested young future composer of Ol Man River was given his first opportunity to compose the music for an entire score, the obscure but historic The Red Petticoat.

In 1916, Young teamed up with composers Sigmund Romberg and Emmerich Klmn on the hit show Her Soldier Boy. One year later, she again collaborated with Romberg on an even greater wartime musical hit, Maytime (492 performances), which contained one of Young and Rombergs best-remembered songs, Will You Remember? and is credited, again by Bordman, for keeping the vogue for operetta alive during the height of the war. The latter two works also amply served Youngs specialty, the Americanization of Viennese stage stories, for which the librettist heroine of this present volume deserves her fair share of credit. Near the end of the war in 1918, Young teamed with Rudolf Friml, another distinguished operetta composer, on yet another hit show, Sometime. A few years later in 1921, she reunited with Herbert on the less successful The Dream Girl, which turned out to be the final Herbert musical to be produced when it was performed in 1924, the year of the composers death.